


if i never meet you in this life let me feel the lack (a glance from your eyes & my life is yours)

by possibilist



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, don't worry no one actually dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-28
Updated: 2014-11-28
Packaged: 2018-02-27 07:53:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2685062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/possibilist/pseuds/possibilist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'You think she would’ve been suited for an ancient funeral pyre, white stephanotis woven in her dark hair. You’d have tried to memorize her pretty face for long enough to not forget; you’d have kissed her and wished elegies and whispered Rumi and watched the flames and the water and were you always a child of the light and why didn’t you say so and why did you have to die for love—</p><p>Sweetheart, she’d have sung in the flames, like this, like this.'</p><p>hollstein post-35. grief & healing. sometimes things aren't as bad as they seem. (i promise)</p>
            </blockquote>





	if i never meet you in this life let me feel the lack (a glance from your eyes & my life is yours)

**if i never meet you in this life let me feel the lack (a glance from your eyes & my life is yours)**

**.**

_where is it that we were together? who were you that i lived with? the brother. the friend. darkness, light. strife & love. are they the workings of one mind? the features of the same face? oh, my soul. let me be in your now. look out through my eyes. look out at the things you made. all things shining.  
_—terrence malick,  _the thin red line_

//

There isn’t even a body to bury, although—you’d have never buried her anyway. She’d probably have appreciated the gesture, you think, that you would  _never_ put her in a coffin again, even if it wouldn’t have mattered.

You think she would’ve been suited for an ancient funeral pyre, white stephanotis woven in her dark hair. You’d have tried to memorize her pretty face for long enough to not forget; you’d have kissed her and wished elegies and whispered Rumi and watched the flames and the water and  _were you always a child of the light_ and _why didn’t you say so_  and  _why did you have to die for love_ —

_Sweetheart_ , she’d have sung in the flames,  _like this, like this._

_/_

You remember when your mother died, of course you do: you knelt down on that hard, stone floor in the church and begged, prayed, cried.

No god answered you then, and none answers you now.

/

It hits you in the strangest moments, the grief: the first time after, you take a shower and there’s a stupid, annoying knot of her hair in the drain.

In that moment you are overwhelmed—by the water, by her dust, by all of what she left behind.

/

You try hard to go to classes, to  _care_ about anything other than the knots in your stomach and how your chest physically aches. She was, is, will never be the only thing in your world that is important, that you will love, that you will fight for: she is— _was, was, was_ —beautiful. Special.

Some days, some minutes, you can smile for her.

/

_Even you deserve better_  plays over and over in your head, followed by  _We’re done_.

You don’t know which is worse.

/

She exists everywhere, really, in her absence. 

You light her candles, that first Friday night after she’s gone. You wonder if she’s out there, in some sort of universe or constellation, if she’s in some warm ethereal bed with Ell, tracing her features and kissing her with such holiness.

There’s a moment where you wonder if it was you, actually, who wasn’t worthy.

You hope they’re happy: Carmilla deserved more than coffins and consuming swords and  _Go run and hide._

/

On Saturday night you get roaringly drunk with LaFontaine on the stash of liquor Carmilla kept under her bed. It’s expensive, you know that much, although after a few painful drinks, you don’t really notice. 

There’s lipstick on one of the rims of a bottle of vodka, red and sexy and heady.

You never got to kiss her, and you figure this might be close enough, because it burns.

/

On Sunday, Perry comes and hesitantly tells you that you have to start clearing out her things, because you’re going to get another roommate.

You nod, you can’t say anything, and when Perry leave after asking if you’re okay and you nod again, you just keep nodding, you stand in the middle of the room for an indefinite amount of time, try to remember the way her thumb brushed against your hand, how gentle her small hands were, her pretty features and her deep voice and how her body felt against yours.

It’ll haunt you for your whole life, you’re sure.

/

That afternoon you start by clearing out the closet. Her “half” of the closet, at least, which had kind of messily gotten mixed up with yours. There’s her stupid thigh highs and her shorts and a lot of hot pink thongs, a stack of t-shirts, and you never wonder why she stole yours, now, when she had so many: color.

There’s all of this black, and you think the whole time everyone has told you the wrong things about that, has lied to you for your whole life: you stop crying and bury your face in one the shirt she was wearing when you waltzed, and  _god_ , that darkness is so holy you think it might eat you alive.

/

On Monday you skip class because for a while you debate, like,  _never_ getting out of bed. But eventually you get hungry, and without thinking, you open the fridge, and there’s her stupid, disgusting soy milk container, with  _MINE_ messily scrawled across it.

For the first time, the thought of blood makes you sick.

/

You don’t know  _why_ you do this, but that night, when you can’t sleep, you go to your computer and take a deep breath and go to her twitter, in this completely irrational hope that she’s tweeted something—you’d taught her how to tweet, anyway, so it’s the least she could do.

There’s nothing but  _doomed for love_. 

You go to her tumblr, because sometimes you think she liked that better, but all that’s there still is  _If anyone could have saved me it would have been you_.

You drink whiskey until you fall asleep in her bed, and it’s warm like autumn, and you think, spinning _I would have, I would have, I would have._

_/_

You wake up at about four in the morning and throw up all over her sheets, and for a moment you start to cry, but then it strikes you as so funny, so completely hysterical, that you have to laugh: you’d literally puked all over her shit, and  _now_ who’s the worst roommate ever?

It takes you until you’re in the laundry room amid the whir of machines: everything is quiet, and she’s not there to laugh with you anymore.

/

You think it’s strange that someone you knew for so little a time gathered so much of you inside themselves.

You wonder if in her death she grieved for you too.

/

The leave things out for her on Tuesday: the yellow pillow, even though you changed the sheets, she probably wouldn’t care; a glass of fresh blood—LaF hadn’t even argued when you’d asked them to get more blood, because you don’t really know how long blood keeps; a package of her favorite cookies; a jar of nutella; a fresh bottle of ludicrously expensive champagne.

It’s a clear night, and you leave the stars out, but she doesn’t come back.

You’re so angry at her you curse her with every language and every word you know, take the yellow pillow and fling it back onto your bed.

Only she’s not there, she’s  _not there_ , and you tire yourself out eventually.

You heave sobs, painful and ones the rip through your entire body.

You don’t have enough breath to apologize, even though you want to.

/

You think about cutting your hair the next morning, stand in front of the mirror for a long time. That’s what people did when they wanted a new start, right? 

You go as far as to grab a pair of scissors before you get the wind knocked out of you, because you’d cut Carmilla’s bangs for her and there are these tiny little hairs still stuck on the blades.

_You have left so much of yourself behind_ , you think.

You sit down on the bathroom floor because your legs are weak. You don’t move for hours, trying to remember how soft her skull had been under your hands.

/

There are muddy boot tracks dried on your floor, and you finally get down on your hands and knees and scrub them away.

The remnants of her steps slough like dry skin; they dissolve like dust.

/

On her headboard she’d kept a small perfume bottle, crystal and, you’re sure, priceless beyond belief. Her perfume was something you could never quite place, but it was earthy and musky and filled with these light undertones.

They say that smell can be the strongest memory trigger, so you take it and take the bottle and smell it as gently as you can.

If you close your eyes hard enough you can recall her wrists.

/

You don’t want the videos, because you need to forget her on your own.

The abject, she’d said once, randomly and offhandedly, lounging on her bed while you were  _trying_ to work on a lit paper, is bereaved repetition, cutie.

You hadn’t known what she’d meant then, but now you think you might understand: to watch her exist in a world where she doesn’t anymore hurts your palms.

/

You’re angry at her for dying, sometimes, because it’s not the same as not loving you: at least she would’ve been out there in the world, annoying the hell out of someone, breaking all kinds of pointless rules.

But she loved you too much, she did, she did, she did.

/

You hear of this lovely art project called  _Bloom—_ the artist installed 28,000 flowers at Massachusetts Mental Health Center. A persistent absence, the article reads.

Carmilla would’ve adored it, you think, this petaled haunt; everything about her lungs.

/

She owns five films:  _The Third Man, Chungking Express, Spirited Away, I, the Worst of All,_ and  _The Thin Red Line_.

You haven’t seen any of them, so you close your eyes and pick one at random.

It’s transfixing, and you can see Carmilla’s lovely eyes in every shot:  _Love. Where does it come from? Who lit this flame in us? No war can put it out, conquer it. I was a prisoner. You set me free._  
All at once, you can’t breathe.

/

You look through her iPod, which is a lot of early punk, grunge, and IDM, but then there’s jazz.

That’s grief, you think, when you hear John Coltrane.

You think she probably loved it because it sounds blue; it sounds like a bruise; it sounds like three centuries of never hearing a heartbeat.

/

The last thing you start to clear away are her books, because they’re what you associate most with her, really.

You do it gently and with care and really you just stack them in a box that you’ll put under your bed, because you figure she wouldn’t mind you keeping them.

There are a lot, and some of them are very old and some of them are in anything but English.

She has a lot of newer—but extremely worn—copies of what you can guess is poetry by someone named Wislawa Szymborska. 

You google her and find out she’s Polish, and of  _course_ Carmilla spoke Polish, and you flip through the books, fingering her pretty, perfect, soft handwriting.

It’s what you keep most about her sometimes: the lilt of her hands, because so much of her was sharp angles and unforgiving grace—but her hands were young.

You flip to a page and spot a translation:  _My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first. / Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home_.

It steals the last piece of childhood within you: and you do not want to be absolved of your sins; there are too many flowers you get to live with anyway.

/

You’re trying to write your goddamn lit paper when you hear your door creak, and you’d been working on, like, talking to people, letting them in, but still you sigh, because today hasn’t been a good one so far.

You turn around slowly, exhaustedly, and you take one look at muddy, heavy black boots and leather pants before your stomach flips over and your head feels fuzzy, because you’re not at all sure if this real or if this is a symptom of more-than-average alcohol consumption and less-than-average sleep.

You can’t really talk, although all of a sudden you’re standing, and she smiles.

“Hey, cutie,” she says—yells, a little bit, and it takes you so much by surprise that you start to laugh.

You walk toward her quickly, and she’s got a black eye and scrapes along her hands and you think her back might be burnt.

“Carmilla?” you ask, and for a moment a flash of confusion passes over her features, but then she nods, and she takes another step toward you and then you’re in her arms, those strong, gentle, cool, warm things, your chest pressed to hers.

“You’re alive,” you mumble, but when she doesn’t respond you back up, because— _no_ , she has to be.

Her face is gentle and honest and so very real, and you touch it tentatively.

“You’re alive,” you say again, and her eyes move to your lips, and she furrows her brows.

“Yeah,” she says, way too loudly, “but I can’t really hear very well, I don’t think.”

It’s quite possibly the best thing she’s ever said to you, just because—that, you can deal with, and you find yourself laughing again, but then you turn her head and you notice streams of dried blood that had trickled from either of her ears.

“That’s okay,” you say, “that’s really, really okay.”

She nods, and the it’s easy, so easy, to press your lips against hers.

/

She takes a shower and then emerges with much less blood on her, and you’re kind of angry, because you’d worked so hard to grieve well, but here she is.

“Hey,” she says, and you turn toward her, find yourself standing and touching her with fluttering hands again, because there’s a thrill of redemption in feeling her body against yours.

/

_How?_ you write.

She shrugs and then takes the pen from you, and writes,  _There’s not a lot I remember._

“Oh,” you say aloud.

But then she smiles and puts down the pen, very consciously whispers, her voice low and rasping, “I picked you. I told Ell I picked you. And I think—that’s how.”

You kiss her again, because you’ve enough absences to make up for already.

/

As it turns out, vampires have the exact same ear structure as humans, even though their hearing is magnified—Carmilla’s eardrums had been damaged, but she sits patiently and with a little bit of embarrassment as a doctor fits her with small, basically unnoticeable hearing aids, and then you say, “Testing, 1-2-3,” and she grins.

“Sweetheart,” she says, slow and smooth and at the perfect volume, “no need to be so loud.”

/

You’re in bed with her later that night, and she’s messing with her hearing aid with a frown, and you take her hand and tangle your fingers.

“They’re fine.”

She  _hmphs_.

“You saved the world, Carm.”

She smiles just a little and then says, “That’s the last time I’m doing any heroic vampire crap for you, cupcake.”

You kiss her and say, “Deal.”

/

You heal, you breathe back her absence by palming her breasts, by kissing her collarbones, by feeling her ache around you. She’s beautiful, more beautiful than you’d been able to imagine. She’s gentle and lovely with you, rough at all the right moments.

/

Sometimes she makes a  _big_ show of turning her hearing aids off when you start to rant about something, and you roll your eyes, and she just grins and goes back to reading, maybe: this is the opposite of grief.

/

One morning she bundles you up in a coat and mittens and a scarf and a beanie—she’s wearing the same—and wraps her arm around you as you sit on a bench and watch the sunrise.

“Let me tell you about the stadium of stars in your chest,” she says, very, very quietly, and you smile, although you keep facing forward, because you’ve learned, more and more, when to let her speak. “Let me name your palms. Let me tell you about their roots in the earth. About how they want the return. Let me kiss you holy,” she says.

And then she takes a little, shaking breath and turns to you, and kisses you gently enough to make you want to cry, to make your knees ache. 

She says, “Let me make up for all of the times I tried to die.”

/

Your breath floats holy ghosts as light seeps everywhere.

**Author's Note:**

> uh, i need hard of hearing carmilla like yesterday.


End file.
